Relevance and prominence get discussed endlessly. The third layer, behaviour, gets treated as a black box, mostly because it cannot be edited directly in a dashboard. But Google watches what searchers do with your profile, and that behaviour feeds back into ranking. You cannot set these values. You can absolutely influence them.

What Google is measuring

Your profile’s performance data exposes the raw material: searches that surfaced you, calls, website clicks, direction requests, message taps, photo views, and booking actions. The useful interpretation is comparative. Google sees how searchers interact with you versus the profiles ranked around you for the same queries.

A profile that appears frequently but is rarely clicked is being told something. A profile that is clicked at an unusually high rate for its position is being told something else, and Google acts on both over time.

Tip 1: Optimise the photo set, because it drives the first decision

Photo views correlate strongly with engagement, and the cover and logo images decide whether a searcher engages at all. Most profiles run on whatever was uploaded at setup years ago, plus a few blurry customer shots.

Upload consistently, not in one bulk dump. Include the exterior from street level (this genuinely helps people find you, and Google knows it), interior, team, and work in progress. Real photography outperforms stock decisively here, because searchers can tell, and their behaviour reflects it.

Tip 2: Treat direct and discovery searches as different problems

Your performance data separates searches that found you by name from searches that found you by category. These need entirely different responses.

Heavy direct search with weak discovery means your brand is known but your relevance signals are too narrow. That is a category and content problem, addressed through category strategy. Heavy discovery with weak direct search means you are competing purely on the local pack and have no brand equity to fall back on, which makes you fragile to every algorithm shift.

Tip 3: Give searchers an action that matches their intent

Every action button you enable and complete properly is another way for a searcher to engage without leaving the SERP. Booking links, menus, quote requests, product listings, messaging.

Messaging deserves particular attention because so few businesses enable it, and those that do frequently ignore it. Google measures response rate. A profile with messaging enabled and unanswered is worse than one with messaging off. If you cannot commit to responding same-day, leave it disabled.

Tip 4: Use Posts for freshness, but stop expecting them to rank

Posts do not directly move rankings in any way that survives testing. What they do is occupy profile real estate, give returning searchers something to engage with, and signal an actively maintained business.

The realistic use is conversion, not ranking: a post announcing genuine availability, a seasonal offer, or a recently completed job gives an undecided searcher a reason to act now. Weekly is plenty. A dormant posts section is a mild negative; a frantically updated one is not a positive.

Tip 5: Seed the Q&A section before your competitors’ customers do

The Q&A section is the most neglected surface on the entire profile, and it is the one where inaction has the worst outcome: if you do not populate it, someone else will, and their answer becomes the public answer.

You are permitted to ask and answer your own questions. Use it to pre-empt the five objections that come up in every sales conversation: pricing structure, service area, timelines, guarantees, parking. Upvote your own answers so they surface first. This is legitimate, sanctioned, and takes twenty minutes.

What not to do

Behavioural signals are the most tempting layer to fake and the most reliably detected. Click farms, coordinated direction requests, and bot-driven profile interaction produce traffic patterns that look nothing like organic behaviour: no dwell, no conversion, geographically implausible clusters. The pattern is visible and the consequence is filtering or suspension.

The durable version is unglamorous: give real searchers better reasons to engage, then let the data follow.

Where this sits in the stack

Engagement is the last layer, not the first. It amplifies a profile that is already eligible and already credible. If the category filter excludes you, engagement cannot save you; if your profile and site do not resolve to one entity, as covered in the GBP-website entity link, the amplification has nothing to amplify.

Build in order: eligibility through categories, credibility through review signals and entity alignment, reach through radius expansion, and then behaviour to compound all of it. The broader framework behind this sequencing is set out in semantic SEO for local business.

Part of the Local SEO & Google Business Profile guide series.